The mobile Internet has changed the way people communicate, stay informed, and are entertained. This requires operators to deploy a core network that combines performance with intelligence. In order to interwork with IP-based network, the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) core network is provided for IP packet services in GSM and WCDMA networks. For the next generation mobile wireless technology, an all-IP core network, called the Evolved Packet System (EPS), is proposed for supporting both 3GPP and non-3GPP networks.
With more compelling services and multimedia mobile computing devices, users are increasingly entering the network and consuming significant bandwidth. However, there is a challenge for ensuring efficient resources utilization in 3GPP and non-3GPP networks while providing a diversity of services. Moreover, this issue becomes more complicated due to the introduction of Machine Type of Communication (MTC) devices.
Quality of service (QoS) is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. A network or protocol that supports QoS may agree on a traffic contract with the application software and reserve capacity in the network nodes, for example during a session establishment phase. During the session it may monitor the achieved level of performance, for example the data rate and delay, and dynamically control scheduling priorities in the network nodes. It may release the reserved capacity during a tear down phase. Typically, QoS is defined as a group of quality requirements on the collective behavior of one or more objects and comprises attributes on all the aspects of a connection, such as service response time, loss, signal-to-noise ratio, cross-talk, echo, interrupts, frequency response, loudness levels, and the like.
In some cases, however, QoS is insufficient to reflect characteristics on services. For example, some services, such as instant message (IM), consume enormous amount of resources, and thus data flows associated with them shall be monitored and controlled so as to achieve an efficient and quick radio resources management in mobile communication networks. Unfortunately, QoS is inadequate for identifying such data flows and until now, no solution is available for dealing with this issue.